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I'm having trouble using the npm sqlite3 package with electron. I'm compiling my electron app from Typescript files to Javascript, bundling them with browserify, and then running the main bundle to launch the main process.

But when I try to use sqlite3, I have problems. I've tried using electron-rebuild as its own separate step before compiling the typescript. I've tried installing sqlite3 with a --build-from-source flag. But whenever I try to run my main bundle, I get a "package.json does not exist" error, which seems to be coming from node-pre-gyp code in my main bundle, which is from the sqlite3 module.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong? I don't understand why the code is building itself again with node-pre-gyp when I already rebuilt it with electron-rebuild. I have a package.json in the root directory of the project, but the main bundle is in (root)/build/js-bundles, and the code is looking for package.json in (root)/build.

I know my description isn't all that clear, so if anything isn't obvious I'll do my best to clarify. (The program works fine when I remove the dependency on sqlite3).

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Okay, so the problem is that I was using browserify to bundle the sqlite3 dependency. By excluding sqlite3 with the --exclude flag, the problem disappeared.

The issue seems to be that building sqlite3 generates a sqlite3.js file whose sole purpose is to find (and load?) the built node-sqlite3.node binary -- but only at runtime. When sqlite3 is bundled and the bundle is run, it will attempt to locate the binary, but it can't, because my bundle isn't in the node_modules/sqlite directory, it's in my build directory. By excluding sqlite3 from the browserify bundling, at run-time, the import * as sql from "sqlite3" will find node_modules/sqlite3/sqlite3.js, find the binary, and then load it into the program.

The lesson seems to be that while browserify knows how to bundle standard NodeJs modules like fs and path, bundling custom native node modules from npm doesn't work. The program has to find it at run-time.

I don't know anything about the inner workings of NodeJs and how the program knows to look for sqlite3 in build/../node_modules/sqlite3 (I didn't know that it could), so I'd be happy if anyone more knowledgeable could provide details.

Also, even after excluding sqlite3, I still had problems because I hadn't built sqlite3 against my version of electron. Resources for doing this can be found at electron-rebuild in the general case, or in the case of sqlite3, at mapbox/node-sqlite3 in the Installing section.

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medium.freecodecamp.org/… is an overview of how node finds modules. Apparently it looks for a node_modules directory in every directory going back up to the root!

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